A lot of people were upset by the mysterious Kevin Curry's post on Techvibes, seeing it as sort of an ad hominem attack on the Vancouver technology community, not to mention a personal jab at some of its better known entrepreneurs. Mostly it reminded me of a joke a former colleague used to make in meetings when poking fun at how big Telco companies operated. He'd say "I'm not here to solve problems; I'm hear to point fingers and assign blame."
But I've been thinking about the issues raised in the article and the ensuing comments and I wonder if we're making this debate far too complicated. Perhaps the answer is more fundamentally to do with the thorny issue of actually defining the technology community and technology companies.
Here's an idea... How about we stop talking about the technology community altogether. In fact, let's even stop talking about technology companies and focus instead on the heart of the matter: the natural evolution of every business from idea, to start-up, to break-even, to glorious profitability. These are the different phases in a company's life in which it needs radically different kinds of support, leadership and, yes, community. The similarities between technology and non-technology businesses in their different life stages far outweigh their differences, but for some reason we've cordoned off tech businesses in the belief that they live and die by their own special set of rules.
Virtually every great company has achieved its success by creating an innovative product, but also by thoroughly understanding and executing on sales and distribution. Innovation can be as simple as making something more cheaply than anyone else, or as complex as creating an entirely new channel for sales. These are very difficult things to do, and historically the tech. community has neglected helping entrepreneurs garner a better understanding of how they're done.
Now you might say that it makes more sense to invest all of your resources in engineering and building a first-rate product than in what comes next. After all, isn't the job of the start-up first and foremost to make something great? Yes it is, but it's misleading to think of the product as being distinct from how it will get to market, and this false distinction contributes to what so many start-ups find themselves doing: running extremely fast only to arrive very quickly at the brick wall that is a product with no distribution. And worse still, no meaningful plan for distribution.
Investors and the technology community as a whole are often equally guilty of encouraging start-ups to defer or ignore anything other than the product, which creates a vicious circle of building things simply for the sake of building them. Which in turn produces a lot of companies and products that probably no-one really wants, needs or cares about. Which in turn provides lots of ammunition to those who like to sit on the sidelines and throw mud.
So perhaps the broken nature of early stage funding for Vancouver technology companies can best be addressed by not thinking of them as "technology companies" with their own special set of rules. Instead they are simply early stage companies that, like every other early stage company that's gone before, need guidance in understanding the different stages they'll have to go through to get from initial concept to commercial success.
Don't get me wrong, I like DemoCamp and Launch Party as much as the next person, and in the past I've even been foolishly critical of DemoCamp for opening the doors to non-tech businesses. But I'd like to see a more inclusive community, which accepts that, first and foremost, we're all in the early stages of building businesses, and our challenges are more to do with the early stage bit than the industries in which we operate.
It seems to me that this approach would do two things: open the doors for a whole heap of support and guidance from outside our own little circle; and silence the critics who see our insular nature as an opportunity to attack.
Daniel Gibbons is a Techvibes Guest Contributor.
My son is now an "entrepreneur." That's what you're called when you don't have a job.
- Ted Turner
I was irritated recently by discussion in the blogosphere about Plurk, last month's newest entrant into the micro-blogging arena. Essentially it's like Twitter but with a visual time-line. Perhaps there's more to it, but I couldn't be bothered to invest the time to find out, and as I've done with so many other lightweight web-based applications I signed up and haven't been back since.
But what really annoyed me was the ridiculous bravado being expressed by bloggers who proudly announced themselves to be early adopters simply because they had signed up for a personal application for free while sitting in front of their macbooks in their pajamas.
For me, real early adopters are those who invest in new technology when there's risk involved. That doesn't necessarily mean they have to spend money, but it does mean they have to insert new technology into a context in which it could bring dramatic productivity or efficiency benefits. The flip side of that coin being that this new technology could equally well not bring those benefits and cause said early adopter to royally screw up and get fired. In other words, to be a real early adopter you have to be displacing something that actually has an established and meaningful place in your home or office, something that has dependencies.
All of this grouchiness got me thinking... It seems that there is a plague of infantilism spreading through the early stage technology community, in which tools and services are developed that add no meaningful value, choosing instead to grab 15 seconds of Internet fame and seduce the blogosphere. Most of us who've dabbled in web 2.0 applications are guilty of drinking the kool-aid cocktail of two parts viral adoption mixed with one part give it away for free and make it up on volume. And worse still, unlike the real success stories (Flickr, YouTube, StumbleUpon, even Twitter), it's as though we're trying to game the system. We convince ourselves that what we're doing is revolutionary and game-changing, when in fact it's mostly quite spectacularly ordinary. This is the cult of the entrepreneur at its worst, where somehow being an entrepreneur has become detached from the need to create real businesses that produce real things for real customers.
My last start-up, Lypp, went through three reinventions, the first two of which were about chasing the web 2.0 bubble without the discipline to ask tough questions about whether anyone in the real world would find utility or value in our creations. It's seductive at first -- surprising how easy it is to get into those storied offices on and around Sand Hill Road -- but in the end largely fruitless. Had we persisted I'm sure we could have raised the A round and perhaps jumped that large chasm in between the potential for something great and greatness actually materializing. In the end we settled for a much more mundane and pragmatic route, using our technology to deliver a conference call service and a platform for developing VoIP applications to an under-serviced Canadian market, and thereby creating a business that can run and grow profitably on auto-pilot. This time next year it will be what's dismissively referred to as a "lifestyle business", which certainly isn't what a VC would want, but just fine for me nonetheless.
So what's my point here? Well it might seem that I'm suggesting we all aim low rather than swing for the proverbial home run. But really I'm saying that the mentality of swinging for fences without doing the hard grind of creating something transformative first is utterly futile. As Marc Andreessen is fond of saying, it's absolutely always the market that draws the line in the sand between success and failure in business, which in turn means that simply cheerleading yourself won't produce any meaningful results.
In a recent presentation by a well-respected Canadian VC, he urged the audience to come into his office and bang their fists on the table, shouting claims of being the next Google. But much like American Idol, where most contestants are unable to distinguish between desperately wanting to have talent and actually having it, I'm sure that many aspiring entrepreneurs believe it's all about wanting success, rather than innovating to achieve it. Try and be the next Google if you like, but remember that Larry and Sergey were working away long before the first bubble burst, and they were applying fantastically innovative engineering to a problem many (most even) dismissed as irrelevant.
So perhaps in the end that's the message: we're our own worst enemies because we confuse validation from our peers in the tech community with the harder truths the market more subtly relays to us. In fact, chances are if the praise from your peers and the pajama/macbook crowd is louder than everything else it's time to look for a real job.
